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Two Ways to Play This Season

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Peyton Manning and Demaryius Thomas figure to be a potent duo this year, but can you afford to have both on your roster?

Gridiron Challenge, our salary-cap based game, is back for 2014, but with a handful of changes and wrinkles that should add to the weekly fantasy football fun.

The game itself is relatively simple: Build a roster of two quarterbacks, two running backs, two wide receivers, a tight end, a kicker and a team defense/special teams, and get points for their performances. And compared to our usual fantasy football scoring, offensive players won't get penalized for turnovers, like interceptions or fumbles. As for the team defenses/special teams, they can be penalized for giving up too many points; however, they will earn you five fantasy points for a real-life win.

In the standard Gridiron Challenge game, an owner must field a team under the $50 million salary cap. Prices fluctuate from week to week based on performance. However, this year, owners have a floating salary cap, which means that if your player gains in value during the season, that additional money is added to your salary cap. That enables you to "sell high" on players if you'd like. It also means that your roster won't take as much of a hit if you have to drop one of your bigger stars for his bye week if you can get a star player at a similar price.

We also have a second option for Gridiron Challenge that's sort of a player-based version of our Eliminator game. In this format, you build a roster as noted above, but once you use a player in a given week, you can't use him the rest of the season (i.e. You won't get any points for him in subsequent weeks). There is no salary cap involved in this game, so you can load up on all the superstars you want in any given week. However, you just can't use them the rest of the way.

As the weeks go by, the pickings can get a little slim, so some advanced planning and research could be in order as you figure out when to use the superstars and when to wait. Investigating matchups can go a long way in succeeding in this format.

Thankfully, you can try out both options, and there are prizes for the top winners in each format.

So good luck and build out the best roster that you can!

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Have a group you'd like others to join? Do you think your team is going to make it to the Super Bowl? Let yourself be heard or just see what others have to say on the Gridiron Challenge message boards.